Rebel Fund

Since taking my last startup through Y Combinator as a founder over a decade ago, I’ve had the privilege of attending every YC Demo Day since my own in 2013 and investing in every YC batch professionally since 2018. It’s been fun to watch YC grow and evolve over the years, transitioning from Paul Graham’s leadership (2005–2014) to Sam Altman’s (2014–2019) to Geoff Ralston’s (2019–2022) to Garry Tan’s (2023-present). YC has really come into its own as an institution and had an enormous impact in Silicon Valley. At Rebel Fund, we’re positioned to be the single largest supporter of YC startups at the seed stage, now with close to $200M committed to invest in YC startups across our various funds, and portfolio companies nowvalued at over $12B in aggregate and growing. As an extremely data-driven fund entirely focused on the YC ecosystem, we’ve also built the world’s largest database of YC startups and founders outside of YC itself, now with millions of data points on thousands of companies, which puts us in a great position to track YC startup trends over time…

Very soon, Clarity-1 will launch as the first commercial satellite to operate in Very Low Earth Orbit. Beginning with 10 cm resolution imagery — previously only possible with aircraft or billion-dollar government satellites — Albedo is redefining what’s possible from space. Find out how we're walking the VLEO walk, not just talking the VLEO talk 🚶

It’s go time!! The Flightcontrol mini-documentary is LIVE! Watch and drop your thoughts in the comments 😃 Or watch in full 4K on YouTube (link in comments)

Big news - Empirical Health is launching on Android! 🎉 Starting today, you can download our app on the Google Play Store and turn your WearOS watch into a personal health assistant. Empirical is compatible with Samsung Galaxy Watches, Google Pixel Watches, Fitbits, and other WearOS devices. More information here: https://lnkd.in/edUEvcCW

I’ve had the privilege of investing in 300+ Y Combinator startups over my career and looked at many thousands more. Over the years, I’ve learned that one of the trickiest things about seed-stage investing is separating “signal” from “noise”. Every company, team, idea, product, and market is unique and exciting, but a good VC has to know what information to pay attention to and what to ignore when making their investment decisions. At Rebel Fund, we’ve taken a very data-driven and scientic approach to separating signal and noise when looking at YC startups. We’ve invested millions of dollars into developing the world’s most comprehensive database of YC startups and founders outside of YC itself, now tracking hundreds of variables on each company and millions of data points overall. We’ve used this data to train our proprietary Rebel Theorem 3.0 machine learning algorithm, which scores every new YC startup in terms of its likelihood of having a successful outcome. When making our investment decisions, most VCs look at some combination of the same aspects of each company: team, product, market, traction, timing, competition, and defensibility. At Rebel, we pay attention to all of these things at different stages of our due diligence process, but focus our algorithm most heavily on characteristics (or in data science speak “features”) related to the founders themselves. This is because product ideas can and often do pivot over time, markets rapidly evolve, traction can wane, competitors come and go… but the founders are usually a constant and have a huge impact on the fate of an early-stage startup...

Today, Wyvern is thrilled to announce the launch of our Open Data Program. Wyvern’s Open Data Program is the first public catalog for accessing the highest resolution hyperspectral satellite imagery commercially available. The Open Data Program provides free hyperspectral satellite images to the earth observation community to help support the creation of transformative applications across industry, government, and academia. Data is available under the creative commons public license (CC BY 4.0), allowing unrestricted access with proper attribution. Wyvern is committed to help the earth observation community accelerate development of hyperspectral solutions for critical applications such as wildfire mitigation, biodiversity monitoring and more. To access the Open Data Program, please visit https://lnkd.in/g83bsRyj Feel free to share this widely with your friends and colleagues. Alongside the launch of the Open Data Program, Wyvern's Knowledge Centre https://lnkd.in/gvNghRmG has been updated to include tutorials related to working with Wyvern data in ENVI, QGIS, ArcGIS, and others. #wyvern #hyperspectral #betterearth #smallsat #opendata #earthobservation #satelliteimagery